here is my selection of reviews from all of the mention-worthy distros i ever used.Mandriva:This distro is extremely easy to install, but unfortunately installs at around 2.5-3 GB. It is also hardware inefficient (just like windows) but is more stable. It pulls a lot of power from your proc and requires at least 256mb of ram to run (but will run on 192 mb). Installing additional components is easy, there is an informative program browser to help you load programs off the installer disk. it also supports rpm'soverall rating:7/10 (has ntfs 5.0 r/w support)

Puppy Linux:This Distro is a live cd at only 200mb. it has a wonderfully tiny memory footprint and is loaded with a lot of helpful little programs. It looks a lot like windows 9x, reminding me of those old days and making me feel nostalgic. i am not sure it has enough power to run a program from source code.overall rating:5/10 (has ntfs 5.0 r/w support) good for virus deletion

Slax 6.0:A good, good, distro. It is live cd/usb and is wonderful for beginners. the usb edition can be placed on a FAT flash drive, and the bootlloader installed, and it can happily coexist with your windows files(since it is reduce to two folders in the drive.). you can convert debian installers and slackware tgz's to slax modules fairly easily in konsole. Oh- did i mention, it is only 200mb? anyway, putting wine on this will make just about any windows program work. Winrar, winamp, jzip, nero, - anything! it is also good for recovery because you can scan a drive for viruses using a windows progam in wine.overall rating:9/10 (has ntfs 5.0 r/w support)

Xubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon:excellent. just like mandriva but installs into 2gb max. accepts .deb's, and has a tiny footprint. it is just like ubuntu except it uses Xfce instead of Gnome. it is *very* easy to use. it can also dual-boot with windows easily.overall rating: 10/10 (has ntfs 5.0 r/w support)

Gentoo Linux is one of the most configurable and extensible Linux systems. It lets the user decide about each part of the system. And thanks to the Portage (a BSD-like software management tool) the whole system or only some of its packages may be automatically optimized for custom hardware which increases the robustness of the OS.

Installation:Gentoo has a "slightly" different approach to the installation process than usual Linux distributions. It's all about the choice. You can choose your kernel, cron and event-logging program and all the low-level features of the operating systems during the manual installation. It takes time and it not "clickable", but the benefit is that you have full control over your OS. You have to be warned however, that installing Gentoo might be a tough venture. If you don't like to read long manuals and Google is not one of your best friends, better choose another distribution or try the latest GUI Gentoo installer (which is not so stable, yet but proves usable to many).

Portage:One of the strengths of Gentoo is its Portage system - a software management tool similar in design to the BSD ports concept. It allows for easy and coherent software installation directly from the sources. The dependencies of applications are automatically downloaded, compiled and installed on demand. The nice bonus resulting from this approach is that the applications are available at the same time when the original sources are published (no need for packaging). Another extra feature is that the user can choose a version (stable, development, experimental...) of each program he or she is installing.

All about the choice:Gentoo is known for its configurability. Every aspect of system can be configured by the user. It's the user who decides whether the programs are compiled with safe options or some bold optimizations should be tried. The drawback of this approach is that the user needs to get to know his system very well before he can reasonably configure his OS. Gentoo is not for everyone - you have to love it, otherwise you're going to hate it.

In pen tests, most likley you will see a distro with a commercial support, RedHat, SUSE, and lately UBUNTU are the distributions you need to target in terms of package managmenet, and specific details of how configuration, and maintance is done using thier own tools and methodology. on the other hand if the Linux distro is the platform where you work from your pentest Gentoo would be a nice choice, however Slax have made it through with backtrack, and ubuntu most likely will be soon

a comparison between msdos and the linux CLIDASH (think msdos for ubuntu) is very easy to use. it has a greater selection of built-in tools such as a memory/process monitor and diff. however, it has an achilles heel,- it is case-specific and does not have autocompletion.

to be fair to linux, windows is horrible with drives with any other filesystem other than fat/ntfs. at least in linux the ntfs module is just a url away to download and install, in windows you are stuck unless its ext2/ext3 as there are some browsers that support these from windoes

what i mean is that linux will take care of anything fine, but with ntfs flash drives, it cannot write/mount/something else.

on another note, i am using xubuntu more and liking it. windows takes 6 minutes to load and then you may finally use it at 'full' speed. xubuntu takes one minute to load, including you putting in you username and password.

also i have heard (and experienced) that in windows you can get a thousand programs that do the same thing, but the same thing cannot be said about linux. perhaps if there was this degree of choice in linux, then more people would become linuxers. but there is a way so satisfy both your linux and windows users. by writing in platform-independent languages, we can easily modify or use our programs on a variety of OSes.